John Williams's Butcher's Crossing Anthony

“Young America” and the Anti-Emersonian Western: John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing Anthony Hutchison In October 1870 Bret Harte published a review of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s latest essay collection Society and Solitude in Overland Monthly, the lively new San Francisco-based literary magazine already being lauded in the East for its “Far Western flavor” and “Pacific freshness” (qtd. in Tarnoff 159). Overall, Harte was content to defer to the celebrated “Sage of Concord,” effectively using the occasion to endorse the idea of Emerson as an authentically national figure wholly worthy of the cultural esteem bestowed upon him by his fellow American citizens. “There remains to Mr. Emerson, we think,” the piece concludes, “the praise of doing more than any other American thinker to voice the best philosophic conclusions of American life and experience” (387). Harte’s forerunning judgement nonetheless sounded a few more equivocal notes. Notably, given his own relatively recent success producing fiction depicting the pioneer mining communities of California, Harte took issue with Emerson’s portrayal of the American West.1 This was presented in the “Civilization” chapter of Society and Solitude where the region is interpreted as a benign domain in which powerful forces of culture and intellect fuse spectacularly with equally formidable currents associated with nature and will. It is in the crucible of this dynamic, Emerson proposes, in typically unrestrained fashion, that a new and substantive national character will be forged: ’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine- stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one, who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands. (10) As admiring as he was of Emerson, such Eastern exuberance proved too much for the adopted Westerner Harte.2 This was not the West of hard, empirical observation, he lamented, but a fantasy abstracted from the “moral consciousness” of the philosopher. Any extended experience with the region, Harte wrote, would reveal that “the piano appears first in the saloon and gambling-house . [and] . that the elegancies and refinements of civilization are brought into barbarism with the first 1 civilized idlers, who are generally vicious” (386). The young frontiersman Emerson invests with such potential is far more likely to “be found holding out against pianos and Latin grammars until he is obliged to emigrate” (386). Harte concludes with the claim that there is something deeply resistant to such idealist modes of projection within the culture of the West. The nature-civilization dialectic posited by the Transcendentalist is almost comically misconceived in its detachment from the lived experience of the region: Romance like this would undoubtedly provoke the applause of lyceum-halls in the wild fastnesses of Roxbury (Mass.), or on the savage frontiers of Brooklyn (N.Y.), but a philosopher ought to know that, usually, only civilization begets civilization, and that the pioneer is apt to be always the pioneer. (386) As Kris Fresonke has detailed, the bearing of Emerson’s projections goes beyond conventional scholarly understandings of American Transcendentalism that geographically limit its conception of Nature to long settled, tranquil New England locales. Emerson should be read, rather, more attentively as a seer-poet of the Louisiana Purchase and US-Mexican War annexations. His thought is inspired by exploration narratives as well as both infused and critically engaged with the secular-political expression given to the idea of “design” in Nature transmitted via “manifest destiny” ideology. Fresonke notes that the nineteenth-century West, not least in the incipient federal state’s and cultural producers’ relentless efforts to map, navigate, and reconfigure its contours, presented an “epistemological problem” to which thinkers such as Emerson sought to provide a metaphysical solution. Once “idealized into a matter of spirit,” however, they found that “nature itself, especially in the American West, didn’t so easily renounce its materiality” (126). Harte’s barbed rebuttal to Emerson’s post-Puritan, providential image of a West in harmony with the forces of “civilization”--theologically and politically mediated via concepts of “design” and “destiny”--foreshadows Fresonke’s revisionist literary history.3 From the journals of Lewis and Clark to Emerson’s western image-making and on to other self-consciously nature and nation-defining texts such as Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), it is during what Fresonke terms “the mysterious jaunt eastwards” that the “West” leaves its impress on “Eastern” authors (155). It does so by arming them with fresh metaphors and frames of reference that help define and re-define the latter as much as the former domain. The intensely eastward bearing of Governor Nye’s railroad survey vision described by Twain alongside the respective 2 transatlantic and East Egg gazes of the mid-westerners Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are signal points in this “secret theme in American literature” (155). Each of these figures couldn’t help but dilute the “spirit” of the West with a heavy dose of its materiality in the form of emphatically non- natural phenomena--time-collapsing travel and a maniacal ethos of consumption--that serve to erase geographical distinctions altogether. John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing (1960) brings these conventionally subtextual Emersonian elements closer to the surface. Even more unusually, its basic spatial-temporal parameters conform to the Western genre proper, its occasion, setting, and moment being a buffalo hunt that follows the Smoky Hill Trail through the Western Kansas stretches of the Great Plains to an isolated Rocky Mountains valley in the early 1870s. Butcher’s Crossing, as will be demonstrated, offers a sophisticated philosophical rebuke to Emersonian idealism in this context that is rooted 4 in both a materialist analysis of socio-economic conditions. Yet Williams, Formatted: Strikethrough while highly responsive to the class dynamics of the novel's time and place, refuses to settle on any easily discernible political prescriptions; instead, the novel’s steady focus on various geographies of the West as best defined by, in Wallace Stegner’s terms, “aridity, and aridity alone” (8), ultimately results in the kind of nihilism Stephanie LeMenager has identified in the nineteenth-century literature of the Great Plains. “The Great Plains,” LeManager writes, “by their arid and treeless nature undermined rhetorics of Manifest Destiny and unique ‘racial gifts,’ raising the possibility that what looked like inevitable national progress across the continent might, in fact, end nowhere, in a landscape that resisted both agrarian settlement and white bodies” (16). The central figure of Butcher’s Crossing is Will Andrews, a Bostonian in his early twenties who, inspired by the anti-institutional impulses that underpin Emerson’s philosophy, is “driven from Harvard College . and thrust . into this strange world where he felt unaccountably at home” (45). Like his intellectual hero, Andrews seeks, and initially at least, would seem to find, a self immediately authenticated in Nature. Andrews’s reflections on his own motives prompt him to recall earlier flights from Boston’s King’s Chapel and Harvard classrooms in a way that demonstrates the symbiotic character of “Eastern” and “Western” conceptions of Nature: Sometimes after listening to the droning voices in the chapel and in the classrooms, he had fled the confines of Cambridge to the fields and woods that lay southwestward to it. There in some small solitude, standing on bare ground, he felt his head bathed by the clean air and uplifted into infinite space; the meanness and the constriction he had felt were 3 dissipated in the wildness about him. A phrase from a lecture by Mr. Emerson that he had attended came to him: I become a transparent eyeball. Gathered in by field and wood, he was nothing; he saw all; the current of some nameless force circulated through him . he was a part and parcel of God, free and uncontained. Through the trees and across the rolling landscape, he had been able to see a hint of the distant horizon to the west; and there, for an instant, he had beheld somewhat as beautiful as his own undiscovered nature.(45-46) On arriving in Butcher’s Crossing, a tiny frontier settlement built around the emerging market for buffalo hides, the young Bostonian is dispirited by the religious rantings of old-timer Charley Hoge in the town’s sole saloon. In the degree of alienation it generates, at least, Hoge’s evangelicalism only serves to remind him of dull Unitarian sermons. Andrews soon finds himself seeking communion elsewhere, away from more conventional sites of congregation, as he begins traversing the “flat prairie . as if seeking a chapel more to his liking than King’s or Jackson’s Saloon” (46). Andrews’s capacity for Emersonian projection of the type lampooned by Harte is also clearly a philosophical target within Williams’s sights. In a 1985 interview the author would reflect on his motivations for writing the novel, noting that on arriving back at Denver University in 1954, after receiving a PhD from the University of Missouri, he had become more interested in the West and its history.5 This interest grew in part out of conversations with the publisher-academic Alan Swallow whose tiny, one-man publishing house had previously issued Williams’s first novel Nothing but the Night (1948). As Williams recollected: We used to talk a lot. We used to talk about some of the differences between the West and the East and the Far West.

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